“Sit.” Buffy ordered, and Veronica – feeling far too much like a child waiting outside the principal’s office –complied.
“I need forms!” Buffy barked impatiently at the half-asleep nurse, playing SNOOD behind the plastic partition. Reaching over, the middle-aged nurse shoved a clipboard through the narrow opening towards her interrupter –and all without lifting her chin from her palm. Buffy stared at her for a moment before sighing, shaking her head and walking back to the plastic chairs. Veronica watched her as she flipped through the attached pages in a way that read all too much familiarity.
“Why are we here, exactly?” Veronica asked. She lifted the gauze again to check the bleeding; it had stopped. She tried not to squint in the bright, florescent lighting as it bounced back up at her from the white tile floors. Her eyes lingered on the patches of grout where stains lingered. Buffy tossed the stack of papers into her lap.
“Pick an alias, one your dad won’t be able to readily decipher. A pop-diva maybe.”
Veronica thought for a moment before scribbling down a name.
“We are here because if we go to the regular ER then this’ll be on record – both on your Hearst Student Insurance and on file at the hospital. He may not be actively checking now, but it might be safe to make it as hard as possible for your dad or anyone else to just stumble upon this information.” Buffy leaned her head back against the wall. “Besides. They don’t check IDs here… Beauty of a 24-hour free clinic.”
Veronica knew and agreed with all these points, but her eyes still strayed from the bullet-proof nurses’ station, then to the chair opposite them which possessed a sad looking stain on it’s seat.
“The doctors are still doctors, and you’re not that poor off anyway.” She muttered by way of reassurance before leaning back forward away from the wall. Indicating for Veronica to turn towards her in her seat, Buffy’s vision focused on her bite. As the older girl’s fingers rested along her collarbone Veronica was suddenly glad they were alone in the waiting room. “Yeah, this isn’t so bad… Couple of butterflies.”
“Excuse me?” Veronica asked. Did that come out kind of breathy? She didn’t mean for it to.
“You won’t need stitches,” Buffy clarified, “That’s my guess. Prob’ly just a few of those little butterfly bandages to help them seal. You’re lucky, too, not very high on your neck… You might get out of this without one of those ever-conspicuous turtle-neck phases.”
“And scarves.” Veronica added.
“And hooded jackets.” A small smile returned to Buffy’s lips for the first time briefly in… well, too long in Veronica’s opinion. “All of which would be hard to convincingly pull off, winter though it may be… Neptune is just too warm a place for such a repeated wardrobe to be casual.” Buffy sighed at this, almost nostalgically. “Wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the strings lightly pulled so it sits higher on the shoulders.” She chuckled, “Ah, high school… hickies… normalcy… I sometimes forget what it was like to not be weird.” She’d pulled her hand back but remained leaned in to her companion.
“I’m starting to feel convinced I never really was.” Veronica mumbled.
“You’re miles ahead of me, Mars.”
Veronica restrained the urge to shake her head and laugh, instead taking aim and tossing the used roll of gauze into the wastebasket in the opposite corner.
“I will admit, however: I never thought I’d be hiding my neck because of something that could genuinely pass for a monkey bite.” Buffy nodded, holding in a chuckle.
“There you go – your cover-story. Just say you were checking in with Gil Thomas and his little friend Oscar got a little too friendly.
Just then a haggard looking doctor walked out of the sealed doors. He was leading a man with such thick bandages wrapped around his forearm the girls wondered if it was all that kept it attached. Watching the man leave, they felt the exhausted doctor’s eyes on them.
“Ms. Selina Kyle… And what is she - you’re partner?”“No.” Buffy said solidly, pulling herself out of her chair, “But I know her.”
“Well, come on in miss….?” He waited for Veronica to fill him in.
“Underwood.” Veronica blurted, “Carrie is fine.”
“Of course it is,” he sighed, holding open the self-locking doors for them. Veronica raised an eyebrow at Buffy out of the doctor’s live of vision. They followed him into the back. “I see that crazy homeless person is still out nibbling people…”